In the following essay, Stewart attempts to refute revisionist arguments about the influence of World War I on Hemingway's fiction.

“Napoleon taught Stendahl how to write.”

—Ernest Hemingway

To ask whether or not the First World War had a profound effect upon Ernest Hemingway would, not so long ago, have been considered a rhetorical question. It can no longer be considered so, since the influential critics Kenneth S. Lynn and Frederick Crews have sought to dismiss the importance of World War I from Hemingway's life and fiction.1 The mainstream interpretation, which held sway well into the 1980s, had been advanced in most detail by...